On Mar 3, 2005, at 11:24 PM, Dan Minette wrote:
But, you miss why QM is defended as it is. The
reaction is as though you said "but evolution is just a theory." What
would be helpful in thinking about this is asking why Feynman's response
was to say "shut up and calculate" instead of pursuing the same intuative
path Einstein did....and why his sucessors agreed with that assessment.
Either you missed most of what I wrote or I didn't express it correctly. I'm not disputing that the equations in QM seem to show the things they seem to show. What I am suggesting is that the wrong conclusions are being reached, and that it could be because we're missing something fundamental.
There isn't a physicist working in QM today who won't say that QM is incomplete. It's inelegant, it has no provision for gravity, and there are (last I checked) eleven possible and totally different interpretations of what QM "means" in the universal context.
There are apparent self-contradictions as well. I referred earlier to the slit experiment's being reproduced on the time axis. If there really is such a thing as qD and "state pointers", how can the slit experiment along the time axis work? Wouldn't a particle's emission *history* be enough to set the later "state pointers" such that all later particles emit in the same way? You'd think so, if there were real meat to "quantum Darwinism", yet experiment indicates otherwise.
An incomplete set of equations with multiple interpretations and apparently contradictory outcomes is not a basis on which to judge larger issues about the universe. You seem to think I'm taking a great leap of faith here, but I'm not the one acting on faith, or at least I don't see how I am. Not by pointing out that QM is probably telling us more than we realize about *ourselves* than it ever will about the universe we live in.
Which, for the record, we do not make up as we perceive it. I can think of at least two very practical thought experiments to prove that assertion beyond reasonable argument.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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